Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy #1)

by Marlon James

Fury is a cloud that leaves my mind empty and my heart black. I

I wanted to tell him that I had come searching for myself, but those were the words of an idiot. Or like something my father would say, but back then I still thought there was a self to lose, not knowing that one never owns the self.

You kill the boy who is you, to become the man who is you,

From women he take everything so they have nothing, but nothing is something too big for any one woman to bear,

If the gods created everything, was truth not just another creation?

“Truly who remembers the hyena? You look like the head of a dog pushing out of the asshole of cat walking backwards.”

Uwomowomowomowo,

“I never said he was alive. I said he is. We are all is, in the plan of the gods, Tracker. Death is neither end nor beginning, nor is it even the first death.

“No story is so simple, Tracker.” “Yes, every story is. No story resists me cutting it down to one line, or even one word.”

“All are friends of the King. None are friends of the King. You might as well say you are friends with a god.”

“Nobody loves no one,” I said. “The son of a bitch who taught you that hates you.

“A girl is a hunted animal,”

Chipfalambula.

It was too quick, like some boil hidden for years that just burst. Then the boil opened his mouth.

You sound like those men with white hair and shriveled skin, who think they talking wise when they just talking old.”

You know what I wish, man-fucker? I wish I had venom to kill the whole world.”

“Them young people, too hot in the neck, too full in the balls.

Word is divine wish, they say. Word is invisible to all but the gods. So when woman or man write words, they dare to look at the divine. Oh, what power.”

This old bastard was becoming my favorite person in Kongor who was not a buffalo.

tsetse fly

Olambula

Sagon,

For the gods there is nothing to discover, nothing new. Gods are without the gift of surprising themselves, which even we who crawl in the dirt have in abundance. What are our children but people who continue to surprise and disappoint us?

What is love for child, if not mania? I look at the magic of my smallest boy and cry, and I look at the muscle and might of the oldest, and grin with a pride that we are warned should be only of the gods. And for them and the four in between, I have a love that scares me. I look at them and I know it, I know it, I know it.

A man will suffer misery to get to the bottom of truth, but he will not suffer boredom.

man should never turn down great sport or great adventure,

All hope in a thing that stick a finger in he nose and eat what he pull out.”

As you drag a man into a plot, so you should also drag the wife, or she will think it a plot against her.

Like every woman, every man, every child in the lands, when she see him, it was as if the Aesi was always behind the King, but nobody can remember when he take that place. Like air and the gods, there was no beginning and no end, only Aesi.

“Grieve? I shall never grieve. I reject it, grief. I replace it with rage. My rage at you walk higher and wider than any grief.”

Truly, you are an imbecile’s idea of an imbecile.

“You can still be someone’s wife,” he say. “You can still be something other than the King’s shit pan,” she say.

No, not belief, for she say, belief will get people around her killed. I say to her, No, my mistress, only belief in love do that. Accept it, return it, cherish it, but never believe love can do anything other than love.

Kill all men.”

otherwhere place.

The blue pulled me in. Light like the sky, and swirls of dark blue like the sea itself. The sea but not like the sea, more like the sea of dream.

The giggle had no sound, but was blue and smoky.

“Men and women seem very loose here. Maybe they killed a child for sport.” “What is loose? I have heard from men like you before.” “Men like me?” “Men with one sad god. You act like old women who forgot that they were young women. Your one god, who thinks pleasure is a lesser thing.”

breathed in as one would drink in.

he wore the thick quilted tunic of warriors, but his belly poked through like a pregnant woman.

If anything these rare moments in robes made me hate them all the more.

I am a fearsome warrior who wants to burn the world.

killing her by poisoning her blood and bone. Bad Ibeji knows it will never be the favored

“Fucking nonsense about divine children. Who shall rise, who shall rule. I come from lands reeking with prophecies of child saviors, and nothing ever came out of them but war. We are not knights. We are not dukes. We are hunters, killers, and mercenaries. Why should we care about the fate of kings?

“When kings fall they fall on top of us.”

I will take a son back to his mother,”

Smell sometimes did not open memory, only that I should remember it.

“Maybe we’ve both had our lives ruined by men only to have our children grow up blaming us for it.

White like only the purest evil.

shea butter,